【推荐2】Have you ever wanted to taste the delicious-looking food you see on cooking shows? Well, that wish has moved a step closer by a professor in Japan, who has developed a prototype (雏形) TV screen that you can lick (舔). The device called Taste the TV can create 10 different flavors (味道). With it, you just need to lick the screen if you want to taste the food on the display.

“The goal is to make it possible for people to have the experience of eating at a restaurant on the other side of the world, even while staying at home,” said professor Homei Miyashita from Meiji University in Tokyo.

“I’m thinking of making a platform where tastes from all over the world can be distributed as ‘taste content’. It’s the same as watching a movie or listening to a song that you like,” Miyashita added, “I hope people can, in the future, download and enjoy the flavors of the food from the restaurants they fancy, regardless of where they are.”

Meiji University student Yuki Hou, 22 , sampled a chocolate she saw on the screen. “It’s kind of like milk chocolate,” Hou said.

Miyashita said that he started to build the prototype in 2020. He hopes his work means that screen technology can move on from just having pictures and sound to a screen that satisfies the sense of taste too. He estimated that if a commercial version were to be created, it would only cost $875 to produce.

【推荐3】When Anika Puri visited India with her family four years ago, she was surprised to come across a market in Bombay filled with rows of ivory jewelry (象牙饰品) and statues. Globally, ivory trade has been illegal for more than 30 years, and elephant hunting has been prohibited in India since the 1970s.

“I was quite shocked,” the 17-year-old from New York, recalls, “Because poaching (偷猎) is illegal, how come it is still such a big issue?”

Curious, Puri did some research and discovered a shocking statistic: Africa’s forest elephant population had declined by about 62 percent between 2002 and 2011. Years later, the numbers continued to drop. Puri, a wildlife lover, wanted to do something to help protect the species and others still threatened by poaching.

Over the course of two years, Puri created EISa, a low-cost product of a machine learning-driven software that analyzes movement patterns in thermal infrared (热红外) videos of humans and elephants. Puri says the software is four times more accurate than existing state-of-the-art detection methods. It also eliminates the need for expensive high-definition thermal cameras, which can cost thousands, she says. EISa uses a $250 FLIR ONE Pro thermal camera with 206 * 156 resolution that plugs into an off-the-shelf iPhone 6. The camera and iPhone are then attached to a drone (无人机), and the system produces real-time inferences as it flies over parks as to whether objects below are humans or elephants.

Its potential impact on society earned her the Peggy Scripps Award for Science Communication. “Research isn’t a straight line,” Puri says. “It makes me resourceful. It helps me develop into a more creative thinker.”

【推荐3】When you go on vacation next time, make sure to take lots of pictures of the wildlife you see. These photos can help save different types of wildlife because of a new field called “imageomies”. Imageomies uses computers to study pictures of wildlife and learn information from them.

Until recently, scientists didn’t have the technology to analyze (分析) the data in wildlife photos. But now, machine learning and computer vision are helping researchers unlock valuable information hidden in these images.

There are platforms where people can share their wildlife photos, like cBird, iNaturalist and Wildbook. These platforms help scientists keep track of different species and create databases. If you have rare (稀有的) photos of wildlife, it’s a good idea to share them on these platforms.

Scientists have limited time and resources to study all endangered wildlife in the world. By using artificial intelligence (人工智能) to analyze public photos, we can learn more about different species and their behaviors. This technology can even help us find things in photos that humans might miss.

It’s important to use the collected information responsibly and protect it from poachers (偷猎者). If we do that, imageomies can not only help save wildlife but also contribute to other fields like medicine and agriculture.

【推荐1】Uses of Banana Peels (皮) You Probably Ignored

Soothes the itchy (发痒的) insect bites

With the good weather approaching, various bugs, insects and mosquitoes multiply. If you want to relieve the sting or bite of these insects naturally, banana peel can help you. Rub the red, inflamed bites with the inside of the banana peel. The banana polysaccharides (多糖) infiltrate the skin and reduce the swell.

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Spring then summer is coming, and there’s one little annoying thing: the flies. To catch them, you can make a trap made of natural ingredients. All you will need is a large yogurt cup, banana peels, a hammer and a nail. Make holes at the bottom of the yogurt cup with the hammer and nail, place the banana peels inside, turn it over, and place it near the food that you are trying to protect. Flies will get into the sweet smell in the holes, but there is no way out of the yogurt cup.

Cheap and simple teeth whitening

You don’t have to spend a huge amount of your salary on aesthetic dentistry to make your teeth whiter. Simply rub your freshly-brushed teeth with the inside of the banana peel every day for about 2 minutes. Salicylic acid in bananas gently bleaches teeth, effectively eliminating dirt which causes discoloration.

Water purification

This effect was the most surprising for us. The Sao Paulo Research Foundation, led by Gustavo R. Castro, tested the suitability of banana peels for the treatment of wastewater from industrial plants. It turned out that the banana peel adsorbs heavy metals such as lead and copper from the water.

Erases the ink stain (污点)

If ink gets on your skin, it is difficult to clean it off. Only with water and soap is it almost impossible to make your hands clean. But the good news is that the banana peel is good for that—rub the patches on the inside of the peel and see how they disappear.

【推荐2】Imagine an island untouched by humans and without any large mammals.Colorful and strange birds of all shapes and sizes fly over forests and seaside hills. The sky is painted with endless clouds. Flightless birds nest safely on the ground, and seabirds cover the beaches. The sound of the bird song is overwhelming. The Maori named this place “Aotearoa,” Land of the Long White Cloud. The world now knows it as New Zealand.

When the Maori sailed their canoes across the Pacific Ocean from their homeland, Hawaiki, at least 120 different species of birds lived in Aotearoa. Eleven species of moa , an ostrich-like bird, moved freely, and the largest stood 11 feet tall. The Haast’s eagle dominated the skies with its wing span of nearly 10 feet. Because bats were the only mammals, Aotearoa was an actual bird paradise.

Unfortunately, the Maori overhunted the moa for meat. As the moa disappeared, the Haast’s eagle lost its primary food source. By the time Europeans arrived in New Zealand, both birds were extinct.

When European settlers arrived, they brought animals that attacked birds. These non-native animals exploded in number because they had no predators. Birds also lost habitat as forests were cut down for wood and pastures.

Within a few hundred years of humans discovering and living in New Zealand, more than half the unique bird species were extinct. The whekau,found throughout New Zealand in the 1800s, was declared extinct in 1914. The piopio,considered the best songbird in Aotearoa, was last seen in the mid-1900s.

Thirty percent of the species now alive are in danger because of other animals and loss of habitat. Scientists estimate nature would take 50 million years to replace the birds lost over the last 1,000 years. New Zealand conservationists are working to save the threatened species.

【推荐3】Iman, the last Sumatran rhino(犀牛) in Malaysia, died in 2019 — bringing the endangered species one step closer to extinction. Now, Malaysian scientists are hoping to use tissues and cells from Iman and other dead rhinos to bring the population back.

“Before the three rhinos (the last survivors in Malaysia) died, we got their cells, and the cells are still alive — which is why I’m quite confident,” Dr. Lokman said. “If we don’ t have any cells, or have just tissue that isn’t living anymore, we wouldn’t be able to do anything. But now we have a living thing that we can use.”

The cells came from the rhinos’ hearts, lungs and brains. What is the most important is that the team collected stem cells (干细胞). One possible approach is to develop these stem cells into an egg（卵子）and sperm (精子), to create an embryo (胚胎) that will be placed into a surrogate mother (代孕母亲). She will likely be another rhino, either a Sumatran rhino from another country or another species. The other method is to take the egg of a surrogate animal, remove the nucleus (细胞核), and join it with a Sumatran rhino’s body cell. This technique was famously used to clone Dolly the sheep in 1996. Dr. Lokman and his colleagues are trying both ways. The team is still in the early stages; next, they need to find a suitable surrogate female.

Sumatran rhinos are listed as critically endangered by the World Wildlife Fund. There are less than 80 alive in Indonesia and Thailand. The fall in the population was first caused by hunting. Later, the situation was worsened by the loss of habitats and human activity. Unfortunately, there are now only five remaining rhino species worldwide, and all are threatened. Some sub-species have already died out; the western black rhino was declared extinct in 2013. And it is a pity that the last male northern white rhino died in 2019.